Performed
by
Multimedia Performance Studio, Silence and Darkness is a live
moviemultimedia performance which integrates live action, song and
dance, with digital projections and sound design. Silence
and Darkness depicts a world in which humans attempt to connect
in the flesh,enmeshed in a techno-sphere of cell phones and satellite dishes,
chat rooms and web servers, artificial intelligences and content providers.
It is a "live movie," a fragmented space-age story of love and desire. Kirby
Malone writes that "animated video projections construct a sort of 'poor
man's virtual reality' in which cell phoners swarm for corporate barracks
around ghostly prom queens behaving like 18th century automata, caught in
a world that is no longer ever silent or dark." The performance is punctuated
by passages from Jean Baudrillard's Simulations, Guy Debord's Society of
the Spectacle, Heiner Muller's HamletMachine, and Robert Waters' "Welcome
to the Machine."